Big Data applications are used for everything from targeting retail customers to bringing new pharmaceuticals to market more quickly. As their name suggests, they are built to acquire, sort and put to use vast sets of information, whether the data points are historical sales figures for a product, results of clinical trial simulations or details in an online dating profile.

A number of retailers, especially small businesses, are moving away from these expensive systems to cheaper, yet a lot more sophisticated cloud alternatives. A typical cloud PoS system should cost retailers between $50 to $200 a month.